Two women memorize lines of a poem and then, to escape imprisonment, burn the paper on which it's printed.

That haunting image opens After Akhmatova, Kate Cayley's play about Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova, whose best-known work, Requiem, revealed the horrors of Stalin's rule in the 1930s and 40s.

But Cayley's play is as much about Akhmatova's son Lev, in the late 30s and in the 60. After spending years in a Siberian labour camp, Lev recanted his politics, was "rehabilitated" by the Soviet regime and taught in Leningrad. We learn about him partly through his interaction with another academic, Alan, who wants more information about the author of Requiem.

"I first learned about Requiem when my partner wrote her thesis on it at university," recalls Cayley. "Apparently you can still find many people in Russia who can recite the poem's climactic section from memory. It's a watershed in 20th century Russian poetry."

What intrigued the playwright was the understanding that Akhmatova was writing a secret response to what was happening around her.

"The level of danger is incomprehensible to me; we don't write under that kind of duress, and the risk she took was enormous."

As Cayley developed the script, it became more about who Lev was, what he went through and what the weight of the poem was for him.

"He had a really ambivalent relationship to his mother. In fact, the poem was a real burden for him, and that's where I put my focus.

"As I began to create the interview structure involving Alan and Lev, I saw a fundamental conflict between the two men. It became a conflict of love and ideology, involving not just flashbacks but a sense of how memory can alter the present. The story became more than an interview: it's now about two men in a room with irreconcilable viewpoints."

She gave an added strength to both men's beliefs by intentionally kept the figure of Akhmatova ambiguous. We see her only through Lev's subjective memory or through second-hand accounts.

Initially Cayley included more of Requiem in the play, but by the final version she'd cut out all except its final section, in which the poet describes standing in line for months to see her imprisoned son, never to have the prison door open.

Ironically, the playwright adds that she'd heard that the prison building is now being turned into condos.

"Requiem is a testament to the idea that you can always resist. I'm fascinated by the risk that people take to create in almost impossible circumstances. The Stalin era was a war on private life, an eradication of everything personal, and Akhmatova's poem - like all poetry, in my opinion - is anti-totalitarian. Poetry expresses a belief in the absolutely specific lived experience; it can't be general, or else it's bad writing."

Co-artistic director of the Cooking Fire Theatre Festival and artistic director of Stranger Theatre, Cayley's written a number of other plays, many of which deal at some level with the transformative power of art.

"I wanted to write a play," she says, referring to After Akhmatova, "that looks at the question of why we read and why art speaks to us, what it is in poetry that might be profoundly important.

"I shied away from that for a while because I worried that poetry is inherently anti-dramatic. But then I realized that both poetry and dramatic narrative, as separate from prose, are about compression, not expansion.

"In a poem and a play, you try to find the distilled essence of what you're writing about, shaving away and shaving away like you're working on a sculpture. In that sense the two kinds of writing aren't so dissimilar; one can inform the other."